See the Databases page for explanatory information about the VKP database.
This database is an index of:
Plus the following data extracted from online scans of the AGAD register books and including the link to the online scan for each entry:
Note: For the death of a married woman, the given name (if stated) of her husband is listed in the search results column Father or Husband. For the death of a married man, the name (if stated) of his wife is listed in the columns Mother's or Wife's Surname and Mother's or Wife's Given Name.
Note: The spelling of names may vary due to many causes, so it is desirable to check for possible variants when searching for a surname. For example, when searching for Buelau, one should also do a search for Buelow, Bilau, Bilow, Bylow, etc. Also, in some instances in the VKP databases, the surname is “corrected” to the more common spelling when a misleading spelling occurs in the church record.
You can also search the Birth and Marriage databases.
1. "Normal Search" is the default. It will find all occurrences of any given sequence of letters in a given search field. Thus, whether the sequence is a complete name or only a portion of a name, no matter where you seek the sequence, it will be found. For instance, if you type in [jaeger], you will find entries that include, "Jaeger," "Lobenjaeger," and "Geiger or Jaeger".
2. "Exact Match" will only find entries that include the exact letter sequence entered and will not return any entry with additional spaces or other characters in the field searched.
3. There are no umlauts in the database (dotted vowels). Most of the umlauted letters have been replaced with ae, oe, or ue, but there are some names where the umlauted letter was changed to simply a, o, or u. You need, therefore, to do a search for both spellings of the name (i.e., search for Konig as well as Koenig, etc.).
4. You do not need to enter data in all search boxes to find data. In fact, the more data you enter into the search fields, the fewer will be the results that will be returned. It is therefore possible that you will eliminate the data you seek if you narrow the search too much.